EJ

This is the end
They kill you right away
Shot on the spot
Papers or no

Where can we go?
Depressed and worried
I was afraid
Nowhere is safe
Tragedy among tragedies

Aushwitz
Straight to the ovens
You starve to death
Only a few remained
The final solution

It’s beyond belief
The inhumanity of man against man
The sadism, the cruelty, the irrationality
They were reported
We were caught

You have to struggle for life
I won’t go to their gas chambers
I’ll never give up
We’ll survive
Let’s hope


For this Found Poem I chose two themes that represent the whole process of the Nazis trying to kill of all of the Jewish population. The Holocaust was very cruel and inhumane of the Germans to do, however at that time not much was known about it during World War II and even afterwards. Therefore, many Jews, Poles, and Gypsies suffered. As a matter of fact, in my poem I chose not to mention the word Jew because I want my readers to know that it was also many others who suffered, Jews were just targeted more and suffered a lot more. And so, for the first four stanzas in my poem I chose a theme of cruelty and worry, which is what many Jews had because they really did not know much about their fate and what Aushwitz was really all about. The second theme is hope because they were still many Jews who still kept their faith in their religion and who had the will to survive all the hardships of the Holocaust.